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SCA Biennial Meeting, 2014

by Cori Hayden and John Hartigan

The Ends of Work

Detroit, Michigan, May 9–10, 2014

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry Murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. West wall (detail) worker with red star on glove.

Registration: To register for the conference, please click here. Early registration for the conference ends April 17.

Hotel information: The conference will be held at the Hotel Crowne Plaza Pontchartrain Detroit. Registered conference participants may request a special SCA room rate until April 17, space permitting. Please call the hotel directly at (866) 710-7531 to inquire about the rate and room availability.

The SCA 2014 meeting invites a wide-ranging engagement with the startling transformations of work today. The contours and critiques of work demand our attention in ways both familiar and new. From the “reinvention” of manufacturing and making to reconceptualizations of immaterial and affective labor, the means of assembling livelihoods—and of living variously under the sign, the imperative, and the lack of work—require our attention, and perhaps a slowing down.

We thus invite contributors to think with and about work in ways that range from labor in feminist and Marxian senses to broader understandings of human and non-human activity, as in performance, creativity, effort, or force in the world. Ends, in turn, need not signal termination, the end, but also the goals and temporalities, desires and extremes, the minimal thresholds and maximizing aspirations that contemporary activities and imaginations of work may entail, elicit, or foreclose.

The ends of work are legible in, for example, contemporary transnational politics of (im)migration, the configuration of race, and the conduct of war. Work’s reimagination is indexed in persistent warnings of a “jobless future” in Europe and the United States, as well as in the rise of New Economy movements, the demands of indebtedness (sovereign and otherwise), the rise of narco-economies, and new/old constellations of intimacy, violence, and love. Anthropology’s central concerns with diverse conditions of economic life, with subjectivity and collective imagination, and with the constitution of spaces of the political, are keenly relevant and even necessary to understanding the contours and content of work today.

The SCA 2014 meetings will be held in Detroit, Michigan. The city has attracted far too much attention as a kind of post-industrial ground zero, and its historic declaration of bankruptcy, in which pensions (alongside art work) are being positioned as auctionable municipal assets, has only heightened that sense. But Detroit is also on the forefront of U.S.-based re-imaginings of the futures of labor and work, within a history that exceeds the breathlessness of today’s crises. We seek to make those projects and those sensibilities an integral part of the meetings. The city is thus more than a backdrop for these discussions. The SCA is working closely with Detroit-based colleagues, activists, and artists to create multiple opportunities for engagement and dialogue, on- and off-site.